view was to goad her into driving their profitable traffic to her last gasp. But there was no outbreak between them and Harold. The father's nature was to cringe and fawn, and the son estimated those thews and muscles too well to gratify his hatred by open provocation, and was only surly and dogged, keeping himself almost entirely out of the way. Alice wanted nothing but to look at her son--'her beautiful boy,' 'her Harry come back to her at last;' and kind and tender to her and loving, as he had never been since his baby days; but he would have moved heaven and earth to obtain comforts and attendance for her. Dermot rode a fabulous distance, and brought back a doctor for a fabulous fee, and loaded his horse with pillows and medicaments; but the doctor could only declare that she had a fatal disease of long standing and must die, though care and comfort might a little while prolong her life. It was welcome news to poor Alice, provided she might only die while her boy was still with her, shutting out all that had so long made her life one ground-down course of hopeless wretchedness.
Smith's most profitable form of employment was carrying dinners out to the men at work; and for an hour or two at noon the little store was entirely free from customers. The day after the doctor's visit, Dermot came in at this time to speak to Harold, and as soon as Alice knew of his presence (there was a mere partition of slab between her bed and the shop), she eagerly and nervously bade him stay and keep watch that no one should come near to see or hear. Then, when certain that she was alone with her son, she produced from hiding- places about her person what appeared to be three balls of worsted-- her eyes gleaming, and her whole person starting at every sound. She laid her skeleton fingers over them with a start of terror, as Harold, puzzled at first, would have unwound one; but made him weigh them, parted the covering with her nail, and showed for one instant a yellow gleam. Each held a nugget of unusual size! Her urgency and her terror were excessive till they were out of sight in his pockets, though he protested that this was but to satisfy her for the moment; he could not keep them. She laid her head so close to his that she could whisper, and told him they were not meant for him. They were payment for the L200 of which her husband had defrauded the elder Eustace, and which had been a heavy weight ever since on her high- spirited pride. By one of the strange chances that often befell in the early days of the goldfields, she, going to draw water at a little stream soon after her first arrival, had seen these lying close together in the bed of the shallow rivulet--three lumps of gold formed by a freak of nature into the likeness of the golden pippins her father used to be so proud of, and the gathering of which had been the crisis of the courtship of the two handsome lads from Arghouse.
With the secretiveness that tyranny had taught her, Alice hid her treasure; and with the inborn honest pride which had, under Smith's dominion, cost her so much suffering, she swore to herself that they should go to Eustace to wipe out the fraud against his father. She had sought opportunities ever since, and believed that she should have to send for some man in authority when she was dying, and no one could gainsay her, and commit them to him, little guessing that it was in her own son's hands that she should place them.
As little did she reckon on what Harold chose to do. He said that for him to conceal them, and take them away without her husband's knowledge, would be mere robbery; but that he would show them to Smith, and sign a receipt for them, 'for Eustace Alison,' in payment of the sum of L200 due from James Smith to his father. Mr. Tracy and his friend, the policeman, should be witnesses, and the nuggets themselves should be placed in charge of the police, when their weight and value would be ascertained, and any overplus returned to Smith. The poor woman trembled exceedingly--Dermot heard the rustling as he stood outside; and he also heard Harold's voice soothing her, and assuring her that she should not be left to the revenge of young Dick Smith. No, she feared not that; she was past the dread of Dick for herself, but not for Harold. He laughed, and said that they durst not touch him.
For his mother's relief, and for Dermot's safety, he, however, waited to say anything till the assistance of the gentleman of the police force had been secured, so that there might be no delay to allow Dick Smith to gather his fellows for revenge or recovery of the gold.
And with these precautions all went well. Harold, in the grave, authoritative way that had grown on him, reminded Mr. Smith of a heavy debt due to his uncle; and when the wretched man began half to deny and half to entreat in the same breath, Harold said that he had received from his mother a deposit in payment thereof, and that he had prepared a receipt, which he requested Mr. Smith to see him sign in presence of the two witnesses now waiting.
Smith's resentment and disappointment at the sight of the treasure his wife had hidden from him were unspeakable. He was not an outwardly passionate man, and he was in mortal fear, not only of the giant who seemed to fill up all his little room, but also of anything that could compromise him with the police. So he suppressed his passion, aware that resistance would bring out stories that could not bear the light. Harold signed, and the golden apples were carried away to the office, where Mr. Smith was invited to come the next day and see them weighed.
That night Harold kept watch over his mother; and Dermot, who was thought to be at his friend's shanty, kept watch near the door: but Dick Smith, hating Harold's presence, had gone on an excursion lasting some days, and before his father went in quest of him in the morning, Harold had a proposal ready--namely, to continue to pay Smith what he already allowed his mother, with an addition, provided he were allowed to take her with him to Dunedin, and, if possible, home.
Smith haggled, lamented, and pretended to hesitate, but accepted the terms at last, and then showed considerable haste in setting the party off on their journey before his son should come home, fearing, perhaps, some deadly deed if Dick should discover what a prey the poor woman had concealed from him, while she was within his reach; and as the worth of the apples was estimated at about twenty pounds beyond the debt, Harold paid this to him at once, and they left him in the meek, plausible, tearful stage of intoxication, piteously taking leave of his wife as if she were the very darling of his heart, and making fine speeches about his resolution to consign her to her son for the sake of her health. So contemptible had the poor creature become, that Harold found it easier to pity than to hate him.
Besides, Harold had little thought then to spare from the eager filial and maternal affection that had been in abeyance all the years since poor Alice's unhappy marriage. For a little while the mother and son were all in all to each other. The much-enduring woman, used to neglected physical suffering, bore the journey apparently well, when watched over and guarded with a tender kindness recalling that of the husband of her youth; and Harold wrote to me from Dunedin full of hope and gladness, aware that his mother could never be well again, but trusting that we might yet give her such peace and rest as she had never yet tasted.
Again came bitter vexation in Eustace's way of receiving the intelligence. 'I hope he does not mean to bring her here. It would be so extremely inconvenient--not a widow even! It would just confirm all the scandals
'I thought she had been almost as much a mother to you as your own?'
'Oh, that was when I was at school, and they were paid for it. Besides, what a deceitful fellow Smith was, and how he defrauded me.'
'And how she has restored it!'
'I hope Harold will not go and get those nuggets changed into specie. They would make splendid ornaments-- so distingue with such a story attached to them.'
I could only again tell myself that my first impression had been right, and that he must be underwitted to be so absolutely impervious to gratitude. How Harold must have bolstered him up to make him so tolerable as he had been.
He need not have feared. Alice's improvement was but a last flash of the expiring flame. She grew worse the very day after Harold wrote to me, and did not live three weeks after he brought her into the town, though surrounded by such cares as she had never known before. She died, they said, more from being worn out than from the disease. She had done nothing her whole lifetime but toil for others; and if unselfishness and silent slavery can be religion in a woman, poor Alice had it. But!
Harold once asked her the saddest question that perhaps a son could ask: 'Mother, why did you never teach me to say my prayers?'
She stared at him with her great, sunken, uncomplaining eyes, and said, 'I hadn't time;' and as he gave some involuntary groan, she said, 'You see we never got religion, not Dorothy and me, while we were girls; and when our troubles came, I'm sure we'd no time for such things as that. When your father lay a-dying, he did say, 'Alice, take care the boy gets to know his God better than we have done;' but you were a great big boy by that time, and I thought I would take care you was taught by marrying a parson and a schoolmaster; but there, I ought to have remembered there was none so hard on us as the parsons!'
Nor would she see a clergyman. She had had enough of that sort, she said, with the only petulance she ever
